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To the homeboys selling crack in the stairwells of the Robert Taylor Homes slum projects on Chicago’s South Side back in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh must have been an odd sight, a tall, dark-skinned fellow with a ponytail and a tie-dyed shirt flourishing a researcher’s clipboard and asking: “How does it feel to be black and poor?”

They figured him as a member of a Mexican gang or an Arab, and held him until the gang leader, JT, assayed his academic credentials and his origins as an Indian raised in southern California, and said he could stay around. JT’s decision set Venkatesh – a sociology student at the University of Chicago – on a path that eventually led to Harvard and a professorship at Columbia. His years of research have already yielded two formal academic works, and in 2006 his study of the retail economics of crack peddling featured in the bestseller Freakonomics (the chapter was called, catchily, “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?”). Now he steps out from academia to tell the story behind the statistics: his memoir is a colourful and sympathetic account of slum life and the endless battles of the extremely poor to make it to the end of the day in one piece.

The slums come alive in his glancing descriptions: urine-soaked stairwells inhabited by squatters and cruised by hookers; 16-storey buildings with bleak outside corridors savaged by Chicago’s winds; welcoming apartments in which heroic mothers cram Venkatesh’s plate with soul food as he writes up his notes. His posture is genuinely one of respect. The gang members are not the “superpredators” demonised by the right-wing criminologists who dominated discussions of the ghetto in the late 1980s and 1990s. They are humans given scant choices.

“You want to understand how black folks live in the projects,” Ms Bailey, one of the key power-brokers, tells Venkatesh. “Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”

Venkatesh’s particular talent is to have figured out how the building that he studies works as a collective business enterprise; how the truly desperate squeeze $100 a month out of recycling rubbish; how the hookers rate their services ($5-$10 for a blow job, $25 for straight sex, or a simple barter deal for drugs). He had one huge stroke of good fortune in the form of a secret gift of the gang’s business accounts, methodically maintained by JT’s bookkeeper, T-Bone. Using the notebook, he established exactly what the junior drug vendors in JT’s army were making (minimum wage, hence the need to live with their moms), what JT himself was pulling down (from $30,000 a year, up to as much as $100,000 at his apex), the levies extorted by the gang from the local shopkeepers, from the squatters, and from the hookers. He explains how a vast urban slum (population 27,000, unemployment rate 95%) was actually governed by innumerable quid pro quos and intricate contracts that, being unwritten, were enforced by the threat or the direct exercise of violence.

Venkatesh lets the reader know early on that, yes, he witnessed more or less mutely some bad stuff, initially when JT beats up an elderly squatter called C-Note who refuses to stop working on a car in an area the gang want to use for basketball: “ ‘I told you, nigger,’ JT said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note’s, ‘but you just don’t listen, do you?’ He sounded exasperated but there was also a sinister tone to his voice I’d never heard before. ‘Why are you making this harder?’ He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head, grunting with each slap, C-Note’s head flopping back and forth like a toy . . . then JT’s henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach.”

It takes C-Note two months to recover from the beating. A few pages later, Venkatesh writes: “JT and I resumed our normal relationship . . . I kept my questions to myself . . . While I was by no means comfortable watching drug addicts smoke crack, the C-Note affair gave me greater pause. He was an old man in poor health; he could hardly be expected to defend himself against men twice his size and half his age, men who also happened to carry guns . . . But I didn’t do anything. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t confront JT about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.”

This observer/participant theme weaves its way uncertainly through the book. Venkatesh’s academic advisers remind him that witnessing criminal activities renders him liable to charges of conspiracy. More experienced ethnographers caution him against excessive involvement with his subjects. His own entrepreneurial instincts prompt him to assert too shrilly the originality of his research methods (ie, directly observing poor people), also to contrive the signally unconvincing chapter that gives the book its title, Gang Leader for a Day. It is plain that Venkatesh was nothing of the sort. Under the careful eye of JT and his lieutenants he is allowed to make a few inconsequential decisions before surrendering the imaginary role.

It is as a participant that Venkatesh makes the astounding decision to pass onto JT and Ms Bailey the actual earnings revealed to him by the small-time hustlers, hookers and marginal players whose confidence he has fostered down the years. Furious at the news of tiny profits undisclosed to them, JT and Ms Bailey promptly exact retribution, thus earning Venkatesh the well-merited suspicion of his informants. Venkatesh never really explains his shameful conduct and one can only conclude it was pride that led him on. He couldn’t resist strutting his stuff.

History sidles briefly into the book. Elderly black men muse nostalgically on the days of the Black Panthers, who offered social services along with incendiary politics to the ghetto. The 63-year-old Cordella Levy recalls how women used to run social life in the projects before the possibility of decent local employment disappeared and the drug gangs came in, establishing the cash nexus and the rule of force as the motor of social relations. “It was a time for women,” Levy says, “a place for women. The men ruined everything.” Young men such as JT who beats up C-Note. Eventually, Venkatesh asks him why, and JT answers: “C-Note was challenging my authority . . . I had niggers watching me, and I had to do what I had to do.”

That sense of insecurity and impermanence — in jobs, relationships, lodging, life itself — that so imbues the lives of poor people takes over in the final chapters which are set in 1996. The Robert Taylor Homes are scheduled for demolition; amid the rubble lies JT’s empire, even as a federal onslaught puts many of the leaders of his gang behind bars.

Venkatesh says now that JT’s lieutenant, T-Bone, the one who secretly gave him the gang’s ledgers, was given 10 years for drug trafficking and died in prison. JT gets out of the gang business, but the barbershop he sets up fails. He thought he was going to be the hero of Venkatesh’s book; presumably by now he has realised that this was a role the author had reserved for himself, crowing on the last page that he was “a rogue sociologist, breaking conventions and flouting the rules”. Of course, the roguery has done him no end of good and Gang Leader for a Day will probably end up as a film. And the moral is . . . But there is no moral. Venkatesh is a describer not a reformer, which gives his interesting memoir a thoroughly modern, albeit chill feel, rather like the new name for the low-rise, mixed-use development that has replaced the Robert Taylor Homes (themselves named for a 1940s black crusader for decent housing for blacks in Chicago). The new zone is called Legends South.

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY: A Young Sociologist Crosses the Line by Sudhir Venkatesh
Allen Lane £18.99 pp302

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